Energy-aware UAV Path Planning with Adaptive Speed

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are a versatile platform that can be used for many data collection applications including emergency response, environmental monitoring, surveillance and many others. In this work, we investigate how to plan efficient paths that minimize mission completion time for UAV data collection where the UAV must rendezvous with a moving ground vehicle that cannot stop and wait for the UAV. We also address the limited onboard energy storage issue by adapting UAV speed. We propose a mixedinteger nonlinear program solution to solve the underlying path planning problem to optimality and provide a more tractable alternative approach. We evaluate our two approaches in extensive simulations using real UAV characteristics and prototype our solution on a physical drone testbed. We show that our two approaches can reduce completion time by up to 23. 8% and 14. 5%, respectively, when compared against other baseline approaches and demonstrate the importance of UAV speed adaptation in route planning for UAVs.

Authors

• Jonathan Diller Colorado School of Mines
• Qi Han

Keywords

• UAV Path Planning
• Cooperative Vehicle Routing
• Mixed-Integer
• Nonlinear Program